8 / 10
Official trailer
My Way is the most ambitious Korean war film ever produced. Kang Je-gyu spent twenty-five million dollars making it. The film was the most expensive Korean production in history at the time of release. It follows a Korean marathon runner across four armies and three continents from 1928 to 1944.
The premise sounds crazy on paper, and Kang pulls most of it off anyway. The 8 is for a film that reaches for something almost nobody else has tried to film and lands the reach more often than it misses.
Kang Je-gyu had previously directed Shiri (1999) and Taegukgi (2004). Both were major Korean blockbusters. Taegukgi remains among the best Korean War films ever made. My Way was meant to be his international breakthrough. The film underperformed in Korea because Korean audiences were uncomfortable with the sympathetic portrayal of a Korean soldier wearing a Japanese uniform. It did better internationally because international audiences weren’t carrying the same historical wounds.
What grabs me about My Way is the sheer nerve of it. Kang tries to fit four armies, three continents and sixteen years into one film, and most of the time he gets away with it.
I’ve got a soft spot for directors who swing this big, and outside Hollywood war films rarely swing bigger. My reservation is the running time, which crams too much into too little space. The two men at the center held me from the first race to the last beach.
The True Story
A real photograph loosely inspired the film. The photograph shows American forces capturing a Korean man in German Wehrmacht uniform shortly after the D-Day landings in June 1944. The man was identified as Yang Kyoungjong. The Japanese Imperial Army had conscripted him in Korea. Soviet forces captured him during the Battles of Khalkhin Gol in 1939 and conscripted him into the Soviet Army to fight Germans. German forces captured him during Operation Barbarossa and conscripted him into the Wehrmacht to defend the Atlantic Wall. American forces finally captured him at Normandy.
The full story is more complicated than the photograph suggests.
Historians have questioned aspects of the Yang account. Some have argued the photographed individual may not be Korean at all. The film treats the premise as factual foundation instead of as documentary reconstruction. Kang uses the basic shape of the story to construct his own characters and his own plot. The film is fiction inspired by history instead of history filmed as fiction. I don’t hold the shaky history against it. Kang never pretends he’s making a documentary, and judging the film as one would be silly.
The Setup
Kim Jun-shik (Jang Dong-gun) is a Korean marathon runner training under Japanese colonial rule in 1928. He grows up working as a rickshaw puller in Seoul. He competes against Tatsuo Hasegawa (Joe Odagiri), the grandson of the Japanese commander overseeing the region. The two boys develop a rivalry that defines both their lives. Jun-shik wants to compete in the Olympic marathon. Tatsuo wants to win the same race. The colonial situation makes their competition more than athletic.
A Korean beating a Japanese in athletic competition is a political event regardless of how the two competitors feel about it.
The two are eventually conscripted into the Japanese Imperial Army and sent to fight Soviet forces at Nomonhan in 1939.
Tatsuo has become a Japanese officer. Jun-shik is a Korean conscript under his command. The hierarchy makes their childhood rivalry impossible to maintain in normal form. They have to find new terms for their relationship under conditions that neither of them controls. The film is about whether they can.
The Cast
Jang Dong-gun plays Jun-shik through more than fifteen years of physical transformation, from teenage rickshaw puller to a hardened soldier who has fought across three continents. Jang carries the whole arc, shifting from idealistic to exhausted to determined to numb, and I believe every stage of it. I’d rank it with the strongest Korean lead performances of the previous twenty years. The numb stretch near the end is the part of his work that stays with me longest. Jang had been a leading man in Korean cinema for over a decade.
His role in My Way shows what he was capable of when given material that required full commitment.
Joe Odagiri plays Tatsuo as the more complex of the two leads.
Tatsuo is a Japanese officer in an imperial military that’s committing systematic atrocities across Asia. He’s also a man whose childhood rivalry with Jun-shik has become the defining relationship of his life. Odagiri plays the contradiction without resolving it. Tatsuo isn’t redeemed. Tatsuo isn’t vilified. Tatsuo is a man trying to maintain personal integrity within a system that doesn’t allow integrity. The performance is brutal because Odagiri refuses to make Tatsuo easy to categorize.
Fan Bingbing appears in supporting role as Shirai, a Chinese sniper fighting Japanese forces. Her role is brief but memorable. The casting of a major Chinese star in a Korean production indicates the international ambition of the project. Fan Bingbing was at the height of her career when the film was made.
Her presence gave Chinese audiences a reason to engage with the film. The casting also generated diplomatic complications because the character is fighting Japanese forces in occupied China.
The supporting cast of Japanese, Russian, and German actors creates the ensemble work the film requires. The film is multilingual. Characters speak Korean, Japanese, Russian, German, and occasionally English depending on which army they’re currently embedded with. That language work earns real respect. Most international productions cheat on language, with German officers chatting away in accented English. My Way commits to the linguistic reality of its premise.
For Writers
The film’s central relationship works because Kang establishes the rivalry between Jun-shik and Tatsuo in childhood before history forces them into roles that can’t be reconciled. The childhood material isn’t nostalgia. The childhood material is structural. Once the audience understands what these two boys meant to each other when they were teenagers, every later scene between them holds the memory of what they used to be. The lesson for writers is that long relationships between characters benefit from establishing the relationship before the central conflict begins.
A rivalry born inside a war is just a rivalry. A rivalry that survived a war between two specific human beings is a tragedy. The same dramatic material lands at different emotional weights depending on how much foundation the writer has laid. My Way lays major foundation. The investment pays off across the runtime.
The Nomonhan Sequence
The Battle of Nomonhan in 1939 sets the structural pattern for the rest of the film. Japanese forces engaged Soviet forces along the Mongolian border. The Japanese lost.
The defeat shaped Japanese strategic thinking for the rest of the war. My Way reconstructs the battle with heavy physical commitment. Practical effects. Real explosions. Soldiers in mud. Tanks in motion across actual landscape. The sequence runs for real duration and is the first major demonstration of what the production was willing to spend on physical reality.
Kang shoots the battle from inside the Japanese unit, so the Soviet attacks hit us the way they hit the soldiers. The camera stays close and the cutting is fast without turning to mush. I can follow where everybody is and still feel the panic, and that pairing is harder to pull off than it looks. Most war films settle for clean spatial logic or for pure chaos. My Way goes after both and mostly gets there, and this is the sequence that convinced me Kang could handle everything that follows.
The sequence ends with Jun-shik and Tatsuo captured by Soviet forces. The capture sets up the next major segment of the film. The film doesn’t slow down to mark the transition. The Soviet labor camp opens in the next sequence. The film asks the audience to keep up, and I’m all for that. I’d sooner be rushed than spoon-fed. The pacing assumption is that the audience can follow rapid geographic and political shifts because the audience is invested in the central characters. The investment carries the structural shifts.
The Soviet Sequences
The Soviet labor camp sequences are the emotional center of the film. Jun-shik and Tatsuo are imprisoned together under conditions that erase the distinction between Korean and Japanese. They’re simply prisoners. The Soviet guards don’t care about the colonial hierarchies that shaped the previous Japanese army sequences. The two men have to survive together or die separately. The choice strips away the imperial structure that’s structured their relationship for the previous twenty years.
The labor camp sequences also introduce Shirai, the Chinese fighter Fan Bingbing plays. Soviet forces captured Shirai while she was fighting against Japan in occupied China. Her presence forces Jun-shik and Tatsuo to confront the wider Japanese atrocities that they had been able to ignore while operating within the Imperial Army. Shirai’s existence is the moral problem the rest of the film can’t resolve. Tatsuo can’t apologize for what his country has done. Jun-shik can’t pretend he didn’t wear the uniform that did the doing.
The film doesn’t offer easy reconciliation. The film also doesn’t offer the easy condemnation that contemporary Korean audiences may have wanted.
The German Sequences
The third major segment of the film follows Jun-shik and Tatsuo as they’re forced into the Wehrmacht and sent to defend the Atlantic Wall in occupied France. The transition is rapid. The film doesn’t have time to develop the German context with the depth it gave the Japanese and Soviet contexts. The German sequences are the final movement instead of as a fully developed segment of their own.
The Normandy sequences are where the production budget shows.
Kang spent serious money reconstructing the D-Day landings from the German defender perspective. The audience experiences the invasion the way the soldiers in the bunkers experienced it. Allied bombardment. Allied landing craft visible through bunker apertures. Allied soldiers crossing the beach toward fixed German positions. The Normandy sequences match the scale that American productions like Saving Private Ryan established for the genre.
The film’s central image arrives during the Normandy sequence. Jun-shik in German uniform encountering Allied forces. The image is the photograph that inspired the entire production. The audience that’s watched the previous two hours of film understands how he got there. The image carries the accumulated weight of everything that came before. The sequence is the payoff the film has been building toward since the opening.
That image got to me. Two hours of mud, prison camps and borrowed uniforms land on one exhausted face, and I felt every mile of the road that brought him there.
For Writers
A single iconic image can structure an entire long narrative, and My Way shows how. The film exists because of a photograph. The photograph shows a Korean man in German uniform being captured at Normandy. Everything in the film is constructed to deliver the audience to that image with full understanding of how the man got there. The image works as climax because the film has prepared the audience for it.
The lesson for writers is that powerful endings work best when the entire story has been pointed toward them from the opening. The reader should arrive at the climactic moment feeling the inevitability of it. The author should know from page one where the story is going. The structural discipline of writing toward a known ending produces stronger work than writing without a destination and discovering the ending in revision. Kang knew where My Way was going. The film reaches that destination with full force.
The Marathon Motif
The marathon running of the opening sequences returns at the closing.
Jun-shik is identified by his physical capacity for endurance. The marathon training in colonial Korea makes him capable of surviving what comes after. Kang also returns to the marathon as a motif in the final sequences to mark the emotional resolution of the film. The motif works because the film has earned it. The opening footage of teenage Jun-shik running through Korean streets becomes weighted with everything that happens between then and the ending.
The motif also is commentary on colonial athletics.
The Japanese Empire used athletic competition as a propaganda tool. Korean victories were claimed as Japanese victories because the Korean athletes were technically Japanese subjects. The 1936 Berlin Olympics included Korean marathoner Sohn Kee-chung competing for Japan. He won gold. Korean media celebrated as Korean victory. Japanese media celebrated as Japanese victory. The same race meant different things to different audiences. My Way uses the marathon motif to engage with this colonial structure without making it the central subject of the film.
The Length Problem
All told, the film runs one hundred forty-three minutes. The runtime is too long for the structure and too short for the ambition. A fully developed version of the premise would run four hours.
A tighter version would run two hours and focus on a more contained portion of the story. The actual cut tries to deliver all four armies and three continents within a runtime that doesn’t have enough space for any of them to be fully developed. The Japanese sequences feel right. The Soviet sequences feel rushed.
The German sequences feel underdeveloped. The film delivers the ambition without quite delivering the runtime the ambition requires.
The compression forces dramatic shortcuts too, and it loses me for stretches. Characters who deserved more room get less, and supporting figures who could have anchored whole sequences end up as plot devices.
I’d have trimmed the German segment down to the beach and handed the Soviet camp another twenty minutes, since the camp is the emotional center of the film and the rush through it is the film’s biggest flaw. Viewers who can accept the compression will respond well, and the rest will find the pacing frustrating.
The Reception Problem
Korean audiences responded poorly. The film grossed less than expected in domestic release. The discomfort came from several sources. The sympathetic portrayal of Tatsuo as a Japanese officer was difficult for Korean audiences whose grandparents had lived under Japanese colonial rule. The presentation of Jun-shik in Japanese uniform fighting Soviet forces was difficult for audiences who associated Japanese-uniformed Koreans with collaborationist tradition. The film was asking Korean audiences to engage with material that didn’t allow easy ideological alignment.
The international reception was warmer. European audiences who lacked the Korean historical context responded to the film as ambitious war cinema instead of as ideologically uncomfortable colonial reflection. The film performed reasonably well in Japan, where audiences had different reasons to engage with the material. The international circulation has continued to grow since release. The film has slowly built the audience that the domestic Korean release didn’t produce.
Craft Note
Craft Note
International cinema rarely attempts what My Way attempts. The film commits to the full multilingual reality of its premise. Characters speak the language they’d speak. Korean characters speak Korean. Japanese characters speak Japanese. Soviet characters speak Russian. German characters speak German. The film doesn’t cheat the way most international productions cheat. The cheat that most productions deploy is having all characters speak the production’s primary language with suitable accents. My Way doesn’t cheat.
The cost is that audiences have to read subtitles for considerable portions of the film. The benefit is that the linguistic reality of the situation becomes part of the dramatic content. Jun-shik doesn’t speak Japanese well at the opening. He speaks Japanese fluently by the time he’s fighting at Nomonhan. The linguistic shift marks the colonial conditioning that’s happened in his life. The film doesn’t announce this. It simply lets the language change as the character changes.
Most international productions wouldn’t have noticed this kind of detail. My Way notices everything. The of small details gives the film its serious dramatic weight.
Is My Way worth watching?
An 8. My Way is the most ambitious Korean war film ever produced and one of the more ambitious international war films of the previous twenty years. Kang Je-gyu reached further than most directors attempt and landed the reach more often than he missed. The central performances by Jang Dong-gun and Joe Odagiri are excellent. The physical production at Nomonhan and Normandy hits the scale the genre requires. The multilingual commitment honors the actual historical situation. The childhood foundation gives the relationship between the two leads the emotional weight that the larger plot requires.
For all that, the film has flaws. The length compression damages the Soviet and German sequences. The marathon motif works but verges on overdeployment at the closing. The historical premise is more complicated than the film acknowledges. The Korean domestic reception was understandably mixed.
None of that drags it under an 8 for me. The rushed middle is what costs it a 9, and the marathon motif pushes a little too hard at the close, yet I’d still take one flawed film that reaches this far over a dozen tidy war movies that play it safe. It deserves far more attention from international audiences than it’s received, and a cramped middle is a fair price for a war film with this much nerve.
